Marcilynn A.
Burke will
be a panelist on February 20, 2009 at the first annual symposium of the Washington and Lee
University School of Law’s Journal of Energy, Climate, and Environment (JECE)
and the Environmental Law Society (ELS) entitled Climate Policy for the Obama
Administration. She will present her current work-in-progress, The Public
Nature of Private Solar Energy Development on Federal Public Lands. Her article
“Green Peace? Protecting our National Treasures While Providing for Our
National Security,” was recently listed on SSRN’s Top Ten Downloaded list for
the topic, CS: Effects of Conflict.

Darren Bush recently sent
out reprints of the works he completed last year: 1. Economic Reality Versus
Consumer Perceptions of Monopoly, 27 J, of Pub. Pol’y. & Marketing 178 (2008)
(with Jill Sundie and Betsy Gelb); 2. Predatory Conduct, Predatory Legislation,
and Other Exclusionary Tactics in Airline Markets, 45 Houston L. Rev. 293 (2008) (with Shubha
Ghosh); 3. How to Block Cartel Formation and Price Fixing: Using Extraterritorial
Application of the Antitrust Laws as a Deterrence Mechanism, 112 Penn.
St. L. Rev. 813 (2008) (with John Connor); and 4. Electricity
Merger Analysis: Market Screens, Market Definition and Other Lemmings, 32 Rev.Ind.
Org. 263 (2008).With the help of
Cynthia Mabry he will submit the revisions of, John J. Flynn, Harry First, and
Darren Bush, Antitrust: Statutes, Treaties, Regulations, Guidelines, and
Policies, 2009-2010 (forthcoming 2009) on March 2 to Foundation Press. With the
help of Aselda Thompson, he has finished revisions of two more chapters for
John J. Flynn, Harry First, and Darren Bush, Free Enterprise and Economic
Organization: Antitrust. Along with David Spence at the University of Texas, he
completed Revisions to a chapter for the forthcoming book, Why ERCOT Only has
One Regulator in The Prospect of Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Model
(Andrew Kleit and Lynne Kiesling, eds.) forthcoming 2009. In the past few
months, he has appeared numerous times on local TV stations concerning the airline
industry. He was quoted in a Houston Chronicle article concerning the antitrust
settlement between Memorial Hermann and the Texas state AG. On March 3, he will
participate in a telephone brown bag lunch discussion hosted by the ABA
Antitrust Section entitled, Implied Repeals of the Antitrust Laws: How Far are
the Courts Willing to Go?Prof. Bush has
been invited to speak at the Gulf Coast Power Association Spring Conference on
April 2, concerning market power issues in the Electric Reliability Council of
Texas.

David R. Dow has returned
page proofs of his book “America’s
Prophets: How Judicial Activism Makes America Great” to Praeger, which expects
to publish the book in April. Carolina
Academic Press has published “The Future of America’s Death Penalty,” which
includes a Chapter by Prof. Dow (co-written with Eric M. Freedman) entitled,”
The effects of AEDPA on Justice.” Prof. Dow has been named by the State Bar as
the third annual winner of the Individual Rights and Responsibilities section
award, which will be presented at the Bill of Rights CLE program in May.
Finally, he was named by the Houston Chronicle as one of thirteen Houston community leaders
who make up the so-called Joshua Generation:

Victor Flatt was
interviewed on KUHF about the new carbon trading class being taught jointly
between the UH law school and the Bauer business school. Prof. Flatt spoke at
the Texas Capitol on the need for Texas
to address climate change at a state level and his remarks were quoted in the
Houston Chronicle.

Leslie Griffin
spoke
on ” The State of Religious Liberty in the United States” at the Pepperdine
School of Law’s January conference “Religious Liberty and Religious Property
Disputes: Who Owns the Lord’s House?”

Craig Joyce was
reappointed to the Board of Editors of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. and to
the ABA Copyright Reform Task Force. He was also reappointed as chair of the
Committee on Conferences and the Annual Meeting of the American Society for
Legal History.

Rick McElvaney participated
as speaker in a Garland Walker Inns of Court program “The Internet: The Good,
The Bad, and The Really Ugly,” that was recently awarded a national American
Inns of Court program award.He is
co-author (with Adler, Drolla, Gray, Kennedy, and Tompkins) of the O’Connor
Texas Property Code Plus, which is now available in the new 2008-2009 edition.
It was published in October 2008.

Douglas Moll spoke at the
UH “Advising Businesses in a Troubled Economy” CLE conference in Dallas on January 22. His
topic was “Shareholder Oppression in Texas Close Corporations: Majority Rule (Still)
Isn’t What It Used to Be.”

Tom Oldham brought his
class a speaker from Ottawa
via video conference on February 3. Prof. Oldham’s article about changes in the
economic consequences of divorce during the past fifty years was published in
42 Family L.Q. 419 (2008).

Michael A.
Olivas’
book, Colored Men and Hombres Aqui: Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican American
Lawyering, has been made into a film by PBS. It will be showed nationally on
local PBS stations the evening of February 23, 2009:

The
film, A Class Apart, features several of the book authors who speak in the film
about the 1954 case, Hernandez v. Texas.
In addition, the Albuquerque,
NM PBS affiliate KNME has taped
an hour-long show with Prof. Olivas about the filming and the trial, which will
be showed before the national airing. There will be several February 23 shows
in cities around the country, including Houston,
to accompany the PBS show.

Bruce Patsner will be one
of six participants in the Introduction to Ethics and Professionalism Course
for the academic year 2009, at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.Prof. Patsner was a panelist and speaker at
the Food and Drug Law Institute Conference on “Better Understanding CMS and Its
Relationship to FDA” in Washington,
D.C. He will speak at the AnnualAmericanCollege of Legal Medicine meeting in Las Vegas, February 27,
2009, on “Government, Law and Medicine.” His article “The Problem of
Direct-t0-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of Restricted Implantable Medical
Devices: The Current Regulatory Approach Must Be Changed” will be published in
64(1) The Food and Drug Law J., in February 2009. His article “Riegel v.
Medtronic: Revisiting Preemption for Medical Devices” will be published in the
winter 2009 symposium edition of the J. of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

Jordan Paust attended a
symposium on human rights and was a panelist addressing possible criminal
sanctions against former members of the Bush administration for war crimes and
crimes against humanity on February 6 at the University of Kansas School of
Law. On February 15, he was a judge on the final rounds of the 50th
Jessup International Law Moot Court competition hosted by the University of Houston.
His Op Ed “Banning Torture is Not Enough” appeared on JURIST:

Robert
Schuwerk reports
that the Balance in Legal Education section program at the 2009 AALS convention
was attended by nearly 200 people and was very well received. Prof. Schuwerk
serves on the governing board of that section and was co-chair of the program
committee, which planned the AALS program.

Ira B. Shepard
spoke
to the Houston Bar Association Tax Section on “Dealing With and Being an Expert
Witness” on December 17; he spoke to the Wednesday Tax Forum on the same topic
on January 27; and he spoke to the Houston Bar Association Corporate Counsel
Committee on “Throwing Jonah Overboard to Avoid Prosecution of the Entity” on
February 12.He will speak at the
Houston Bar Association CLE series at the JuniorLeagueBuilding on “Tax Return
Preparer’s Penalties: What a General Practitioner Needs to Know and Why” on
February 26. He will also speak to the Houston IRS CPA Society on “Recent
Developments in Federal Income Taxation” on March 5. He gave his regular
monthly presentations on “Current Federal Income Taxation” to the (Houston) Wednesday Tax
Forum, as he has each month since 1982. This month he delivered a manuscript to
the Florida Tax Review for his “Recent Developments in Federal Income Taxation:
The Year 2008” co-authored with Martin J. McMahon, Jr. of the University of
Florida and Daniel L. Simmons of the University of California, Davis, and
published annually by that journal since 2001.

Sandra Guerra
Thompson
has been selected as one of the Hispanic Business Magazine’s 25 Elite Women for
2009. She will be honored at an awards gala in June.

Greg Vetter presented
“Cryptography Patenting and Strategic Implications for Information Technology”
for the Information Security Best Practices Program held on January 29-30 at
the WhartonSchool
at the University
of Pennsylvania for the
Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and the Wharton Interactive
Media Initiative. On February 4, Prof. Vetter moderated a panel at the UH LawCenter
on judicial clerkship career opportunities.

Jacqueline
Weaver
spoke at the UHLC Advanced Oil and Gas Course in Houston and Dallas on the
future of the petroleum industry under global warming. She has been invited to
visit Uganda
in March (which has recently discovered oil) to consult with the oil ministry,
legislators, NGOs and others. In January, she participated in a Houston
Conference Board meeting of general counsels from major companies on hot topics
in energy and the environment.